Read Online The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen by Geraldine McCaughrean - Free Book Online Page A

regretful recollection, then suddenly snicker-snacked at the air with a big cutthroat razor. “Could offer bloodletting for the sweating sickness!” Kookie (who was still a long way off needing a shave) asked for advice from Curly, as to whether a showboat needed a barber.
    Curly was more interested in hearing about the sweating sickness. “Is it common on the river?” he asked.
    â€œCommon as fleas on a dog,” the barber assured him. “Farther south you go, the worse it gets!”
    â€œAnd what brings it on?” said Curly, reflexively turning up the collar of his shirt.
    â€œBad air. Bad food. Too much sun. Overwork. Who knows? But folk will pay to be bled and physicked!”
    â€œStick to haircuts,” said Curly, running his hand gratefully over his shining, hairless head. He had once read a book about an Englishman named Sweeney Todd and did not care for the idea of a bloodletting barber. Casting an affectionate look at the little impresarios, he murmured, “ Did you ever see the picture of We Three?” and went back to mending the window.
    â€œI thought there might be ballerinas,” whispered Tibbie wistfully as the next applicant came in. He wore a tall black hat, a long black duster coat, and a shoestring tie.
    â€œI am Elder Slater, and I mean to give sermons to the wicked!” he informed them, “and turn them back from the paths of destruction!” His eyes glared with such terrifying zeal that the children dared not argue.
    Everett, hearing the preacher’s thunderous voice from outside, came to see if the children needed help. “Perhaps we could dispense with the gun . . . ,” he suggested.
    But the preacher brought his face so close up to Everett’s that their noses touched. “I will dispense with my gun, sir, on the day that the Devil dispenses with his traps and snares!” And he went to pitch himself a tent at one end of the hurricane deck. Cissy could not see how money was to be made out of telling people they were going to hell. Kookie suggested it might set his audience shaking so much at the knees that all the coins would fall out of their pockets, but Loucien said it was more a matter of passing around a hat.
    â€œWell, I wouldn’t pay him,” said Kookie obdurately. “Call that an act?”
    There were no ballerinas, but there was a deputation of four black men with banjo cases. They were not exactly in the full flush of youth, their hair varying from pepper-and-salt to silver, but they were wearing the nattiest getups Cissy had ever seen—including two-tone shoes. Kookie, though, had begun to savor his power. “State your business and where you done it previous!” he said ferociously, and stood up on the stack of life rafts. (The men were all as tall as scaffolding poles.)
    Benet, spokesman for the quartet, gripped the hem of his houndstooth vest with one hand and embraced his straw boater with the other. “Ladies! Suh! We was employed previous by no less than the Hamlin Wizard’s Oil, Blood and Liver Pills, and Cough Balsam Show! We been hired out by them to revival meetings ’tween St. Louis and Houston. We’s close-harmony an’ Dixie—play two instruments apiece . . . ’ceptin’ our banjos are presently . . . sublet. ”
    â€œSub . . . ?”
    â€œIn exchange for a herd o’ George Washingtons,” said the second singer.
    â€œGeorge . . . ?”
    â€œLeft ’em on the peak of the mont-de-piété ,” said the third.
    â€œThe . . . ?”
    â€œThey gone swimming ’mong the sharks. . . . That’s to say, suh, we was obliged to pawn them,” admitted the fourth member of the band.
    â€œCan you sing like you talk?” asked Kookie.
    â€œBetter, suh!”
    And they could. They plaited their four voices around a medley of songs so catchy and cheering that the rest of the Bright Lights were all tempted into the